Open source software platform released by Lockheed Martin

HERNDON, Va. Lockheed Martin software engineers have created a platform for easing big data analysis for developers and non-developers and are open sourcing the project on GitHub, a well-known web-based hosting service.

The project, dubbed StreamFlow, is designed to make working with the Apache Storm, a free and open source distributed real-time computation system, much easier and more productive. A Storm application takes in significant amounts of data via the use of topologies, or set of rules that determine how a network is organized. These topologies categorize the data streams into understandable pipelines.

Lockheed Martin officials see this product playing a role in applications such as systems telematics, cyber security, and medical care. Companies currently using Apache Storm to repartition streams of data include Spotify,Twitter, and The Weather Channel.

The StreamFlow software brings a dashboard to monitor metrics, high-level protocols for making coding more interoperable, and a graphical topology builder that makes it less difficult to assemble and monitor topologies for beginner programmers and users that have little software development experience.

StreamFlow was open sourced on Lockheed Martin’s GitHub account for developers to install on their own desktops. Installing StreamFlow is similar to installing typical web applications, though some initial configuration may be necessary. The software is released under the Apache 2 license and can be freely downloaded and built from GitHub.

The software has a front end user interface that is supported by a series of web services. Future plans include open sourcing of additional frameworks and also support for further real-time processing systems like Apache Spark.